Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (74 page)

Columnist Radie Harris gives a sense of how Merman treated the breakup in public: "Ethel Merman, one of the staunchest of Republicans when
Mamie and Ike [were] in the White House, will be a visitor at 16oo Penn.
Ave. again today as the guest of Lady Bird and LBJ. She will lead a committee of `Republicans for Johnson.... ' After that she takes off to Sydney
and Melbourne. Won't play Gypsy and has vowed she'll never do another show. And when Ethel shuts a door, she really slams it. Ask Ernie Borgnine,
he knows! 1121

Merman's second autobiography contains the infamous "My Marriage to
Ernest Borgnine" chapter that consists of the hilarious single blank page.
Early in the next chapter, she writes, "I'm a lover, not a fighter," words that
may be more suggestive now than they were at the time.22 Some of Ethel's
associates do, in fact, speculate that it was physical abuse that ended the
stormy union. (One fan ventured that Ethel was the barterer; after all,
"Ethel Merman" was supposed to be an indomitable superpower, not any-
one's victim.) For some reason, rumors of abuse have been stubbornly held.
One fan/colleague, who was not an intimate friend, reported gossip to the
effect that Merman considered Borgnine's sexual demands excessive and unreasonable. Another person who knew Merman vaguely from the 1970s
states flatly, "He beat her, you know," as if that were the self-evident and absolute truth; and some of the people who looked after Pop in New Jersey late
in his life seemed to believe the same thing. It is a lot of talk for something
Merman never discussed.

Tony Cointreau says, "The only thing she ever told me was that it came
down to money."23 After Six, he says, Ethel was sensitive to being chiseled,
and in her autobiography Merman does complain that Borgnine had acquired the tickets for their Pacific honeymoon as freebies from a promotional
campaign.

The divorce was a protracted, unpleasant affair. After a series of suits and
countersuits, the courts awarded Ethel the divorce on grounds of extreme
cruelty. Waiving all alimony and support, she made Borgnine cover the expense of shipping her personal effects back to New York. To the press she
readied her lines. Jack O'Brian reported that when Winchell playfully "dared
the impudent question, `What happened?"' at the Stork Club Room, she retorted, "I forgot to duck." Elsewhere, "Why did I do it? I don't know. I certainly didn't marry him for his looks."24

Wanting to cleanse herself of the relationship, Ethel took Bob Jr., now
nineteen, to Hawaii, Asia, and Russia on a trip that traced the exact path of
the honeymoon, step by step. "It was a rerouting of Mom's heart," says Levitt,
"to undo things with Borgnine."25 It was also a chance for mother and son to
keep up what Levitt calls their shared "yearning" to try to connect and make
things between them and with their family right. In spite of their mutual estrangement for most of their lives, Bob says that he and his mother "never
strayed" from that hope of closeness with each other in their hearts.

The Art of Love

When Ethel reflected on her next film, 1965's The Art ofLove, she called it "a
featherweight comedy that sank like lead.""6 It was an apt description for a
picture whose outcome didn't match up with all the talent behind it. TheArt
ofLove was produced by Ross Hunter, Universal's star producer of vehicles
for Rock Hudson, Douglas Sirk, and others in the '50s; Cy Coleman scored;
Don Raye wrote lyrics; Carl Reiner did the screenplay; and Norman Jewison
directed. The cast was equally stellar, with Dick Van Dyke, Elke Sommer,
James Garner, and Angie Dickinson taking leads.

Van Dyke portrays Paul Sloan, a struggling American painter living in
Paris. When Sloan's art dealer tells him bluntly, "Dead artists sell more," Paul
and his roommate, Casey (Garner), a frustrated writer, head to a bridge and
get drunk. Casey writes a dramatic fake suicide note that Paul signs at the
moment he sees a woman jumping into the water (Elke Sommer as Nikki).
When he jumps in to save her, the drunken man lands on a barge that floats
him out of town. Eventually he catches up with her, and she tells him she'd
despaired after receiving sexual overtures from her boss.

When he reads about his own death in the papers, Paul returns to Paris to
witness a veritable bidding war over his paintings and his estate, all managed
by Casey, who urges Paul to keep up the pretense. Reluctantly, Paul disguises
himself in a ridiculous Andy Warhol-like wig and hides out in the house of
Madame Coco La Fontaine, Ethel's nightclub for gentlemen. Casey, meanwhile, is making a fortune without him and is now putting the moves on
Paul's rich American fiancee, Laurie (Dickinson), who has unexpectedly
come to Paris. (She spends most of the picture fainting from shocking news.)
Casey bribes Paul's cohorts to intimate that Paul has been cheating on her.
Meanwhile Paul, oblivious that his fiancee is even there, tries to hide his feelings for Nikki, who is aggressively going after him.

The gendarmes ultimately finger Casey and the art dealer for the murder
of Paul Sloan. Paul, after finally learning that Casey has taken both his earnings and his girlfriend, attends the trial disguised as an elderly man, making
no attempt to intervene when Casey is pronounced guilty. After Casey is sentenced to the guillotine, however, Paul tears off and is involved in a car race
to save him. Arriving at the gallows at the last moment, Paul "explains" his
own death as a result of amnesia to police and onlookers. The film closes with
a set of new couples: Laurie and Casey, Paul and Nikki, and Madame
Coco/Ethel and Pepe, a wealthy elderly man on whom she has forced herself. Universal's unpublished plot synopsis concludes with the line, "Quite a place,
Paris, n est-ce pas?" 27

Despite the comic gifts of writer Carl Reiner, The Art of Love is not the
stuff of literary giants. It borrows heavily from other successes of the time, especially An American in Paris (the story line) and the Pink Panther spy caper
spoofs; not only is there a Clouseau-like character named Carnot, but when
Carnot accuses Garner of Paul's death, Garner dismisses him with "You've
seen too many Peter Sellers movies." The final chase is straight out of a
Jacques Tati picture, and in the trial scene, Dick Van Dyke reprises the look
of the elderly Mr. Banks, whom he played a year earlier in Mary Poppins. This
is only one of many disguises Van Dyke undergoes in this picture; only Merman changes her wigs more often than he.

In fact, the most attention-grabbing aspect of Ethel's role is the assortment
of odd-colored wigs she wears. All were styled in a short, wavy bubble, a hairstyle that Ethel wore, in less exaggerated forms, for most of the decade.
(Louella Parsons approvingly reported that, along with her blond highlights,
the cut made the star "look ten years younger.")28 As seen in the film, the wigs
are right out of Oz's Emerald City: the first is a frosted pink to match
Madame Coco's pink shirt; later versions are blue- and green-tinged platinum. It's tempting to see the wigs as a sign of people's well-documented fascination with Merman's hair, but their presence here seems motivated by the
character she plays-a madam, after all-rather than by Ethel's own star
image, which barely scratches the picture. The wigs, like much else, don't
really add up, except to contribute to the picture's general zaniness.

Elke Sommer recalls of the shoot:

Everyone got along making the movie-it was fun. I didn't have the opportunity to form an impression of Miss Merman one way or another, though, since
my scenes were mostly with Dick Van Dyke. To me, Miss Merman seemed to
be of an entirely different generation and background. My only impression of
her at the time was that she had this bright red hair, and that she was carrying
a lot of weight on her body. But I can't say whether I learned from her or I didn't
learn from her.... we just didn't have much chance to interact.29

Like Sommer, the movie's intended audience would likely have known
little or anything about this older woman who, indeed, seemed to come from
another world. By contrast, older or East Coast viewers could see in the brassy, mercenary "madam" a throwback that went as far as Ethel's roles in
1930s movies. And, just like that work, The Art ofLove underuses her. Universal publicists tried to hype her presence for what they could. "When Merman belts a number in French, you'll find out that fifty million Americans
can't be wrong,"30 said Ross Hunter; the studio talked up what it called the
"flashy French tune" ("M'sieur"), which she sings as part of the show in her
establishment. "M'sieur" is a strong candidate for being the strangest song
Ethel ever recorded on film. It's certainly a little camp but too unfocused to
be enjoyable as such, mixing English with pidgin French ("C'est si bon,
pourquoi pas le love?"), and the combination of Ethel's Queens accent and
the French is not particularly euphonious. Don Raye, a 1985 inductee into the
Songwriters' Hall of Fame and writer of "Irresistible You" and "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," produced surprisingly trite lyrics, an effect that is only enhanced by the chorus girls, who prance around Ethel in strange outfits that
are little more than dress hoops.31

There is, however, a momentary glimpse of what seems to be "Ethel Merman" that survives the strange proceedings. Near the end of the number, she
glances over her shoulder and raises an arm in triumph, shooting a twinkling
look directly at the camera. In that microsecond glance we see a vivacious
Ethel Merman, not Madame Coco executing a bizarre floor show.

During production, The Art of Love encountered censorship problems,
even though the actual power of the MPAA was decidedly on the wane by
the'6os. It wasn't just the bumps and grinds of Madame Coco's "girls" that
raised eyebrows but also her cathouse, which had to be clearly established as
a nightclub. The lyrics of "M'sieur" required modification, with all of the
references to the lips, arms, and hearts of the women of the "maison" transformed into a vaguer, more palatable celebration of love. There could, moreover, be no suggestion of sexual activity between any of the couples, including a nude mannequin that bare-chested James Garner wakes up with
in the opening scene. (It caused a veritable avalanche of letters from censors
to producers .)12

Top billing went to Garner, Van Dyke, Sommer, and Dickinson in that
order, and Ethel's credit usually appeared at the bottom of the ads used in promotion, with her photograph off to the side rather than with the images of the
bigger stars. Her billing, though, is in larger type than that of other bit players,
such as Carl Reiner, who is superb as the French lawyer. It's clear that Universal's marketing machinery didn't spend much energy on Merman, and a reading of their publicity sheets now makes it hard not to think that the industry had
more or less given up on her. Pop diligently cut out every published reference to his daughter with the new picture, though, and pasted them in his
scrapbooks-now numbering over twenty-five volumes.

Ethel talked up the forthcoming flick: "I have a straight dramatic role in a
Ross Hunter film that hasn't been released yet -I play a French broad that has
a cafe in Montmartre. This is what I've wanted to do for a long time, straight
dramatic things," she said, probably referring to the fact that The Art ofLove
wasn't a musical.33 Generally, the New York press was good about plugging
the picture. Louis Sobol's column included a note from Hunter: "I know how
fond you are of Ethel Merman-well, on our tour with my new picture, The
Art ofLove (Forgive the plug, Louis), you should see the reception she gets.
Wild-just wild. She's really been rediscovered by the teenagers, 1134 showing
sensitivity to the idea that Ethel came, if not from another world, at least from
a different entertainment era. Another New York review touted the film as a
personal triumph for the local star: "Fresh from a marital disaster and a tour
of Australia and Europe to get over it, Ethel Merman is back in town sporting a new hairdo, a new apartment and a new movie, The Art ofLove."35

At this point, Ethel was still was insisting that she had no intention of returning to Broadway. "But if I should come back,' she hedged, `it would be
in a blockbuster. That's the only way I'd do it., 1116 It was true that when Ethel
made a decision, whether professional or personal, she stuck to it; at the same
time, she was never one to shut doors on professional options. During her
short time with Borgnine, for instance, she taped two appearances on Judy
Garland's TV show; in February, she performed in London's Piccadilly Circus, where the review read, "The M (for Merman) bomb exploded her last
night."37 (The year before, a U.S. Air Force general had given Ethel the official designation of "Miss Sonic Boom.")38

Woman of the Year

The mid-'6os were filled with events and appearances for Ethel all over the
country. On March it, 1966, Harvard University's Hasty Pudding Club
awarded Merman its annual "Woman of the Year" award "in recognition of
great acting skill and feminine qualities."39 Founded in 1795 as a satirical secret society, Hasty Pudding (so named because, initially, "each member in alphabetical order provides a pot of hasty pudding to each meeting") had been
producing student-written shows in drag since 1891, and every year since
1961, the club had invited an actress to join them in their annual parade,
show, and merrymaking. Recipients included Grace Kelly, Gertrude Lawrence, Jane Fonda, Lee Remick, Joanne Woodward, Shirley MacLaine, and Rosalind Russell.

In Ethel's year, the show was Right Up YourAlley, with lyrics written by Mo
Hanan.4' As soon as Merman arrived in Cambridge, the students surprised
her with a rousing rendition of "There's No Business Like Show Business,"
which she sang right back to them. Ethel posed for photographs in a chorus
line, merrily kicking up her legs with the Ivy League drag queens. This was
certainly not the first time Merman had been photographed in the company
of cross-dressed men (this went back to the mid-'30s), but given her status
now as an oft-impersonated drag icon, it is exhilarating to see photos of her
having a great time, ripping it up with the men.